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Friday, May 23, 2014

Drinks with Rachel...

Minx friend, Rachel Lyndhurst is taking over the minxes today with a guest post...take it away, Rach!

Thanks for asking me here today, Minxes!
It’s like coming home to a nice, warm and cosy place full of friends who have a
lot to chat about. We’ve been pals for some time now, certainly before April
2012 when I was visiting to promote Kidnapped by the Greek Billionaire. And so
much has changed in that time; competition finals, completed manuscripts,
contracts signed and books published by you lovely ladies – the Minxes must
have special fairy dust sprinkles that’s all I can say. However, this also
means we have all written a LOT of blog posts along the way and I don’t know
about you,but after a few years you start to run out of steam!

Keeping your posts fresh and edgy becomes
increasingly difficult as your rookie enthusiasm wanes and the demands or real
life vie for your attention just as much as your new book. That’s just normal
blogging too. When it comes to promotional blog tours you have to cram an awful
lot of work in which must all relate to the same topic in some way – your
writing and your books. Trends, markets and demographics change rapidly so you
can’t afford to be complacent, for example the last year has been dominated by
the young adult market from what I hear. People are buying, reading and surfing
from loads more places than their home PC or laptop. How many people under
thirty don’t have another ‘device’ these days? Not many, I’ll bet!

So, considering how much time she spends
online, I decided it was time for my fifteen year old, gadget-dependant
daughter to earn her keep and give me some hot promo tips (if she wasn’t going
to pair her own socks…). She has given me permission to share her top ten
blogging tips exclusively here, so here we go in her own words!

Make it colourful.

Use a catch line that attracts
your audience. For example: “They do naughty things”.

Pictures!!! Eye-catching and
bold.

Who is your target audience?
Use things they like, like wine and garden programs or something, but make sure
it links to your book!

Be funny – ish. But not too
much.

Use awesome words like ‘paradoxically’.

Make it smart casual. Not too
casual or not too smart.

If your post is boring then
make up a hilarious or interesting story that is gripping.

Separate your work out – don’t
write one huge paragraph but several smaller ones.

Use colours that match your
theme. Like red is angry or passionate, blue is lonely, green is calm etc.

This list made me nod and laugh because I
have read a number of blogs recently that are One Long Paragraph. Really. And
even thought the wine and garden program tip made me wince a bit (guilt!) the
list did spark some inspiration of my own. I now have my own bullet points,
maybe even an embryonic branding exercise (ooh posh or what?) that I can use when
preparing my posts and interviews.

Here’s the ‘reduction’ if you like (too
much Masterchef as well as wine and gardening, yes, I know):

Make it fun.

Make it matter.

Make it real.

Make it exciting.

Make it SELL.

Phew, almost corporate there, eh? But I’m
not giving myself hard and fast rules. No way, I’ve spent a lifetime following
those and I’m naturally rebellious so this leads nicely into a blatant book
plug (gotta do it!). The tagline for my new release Blackmailed by the Billionaire Brewer is: He makes the rules, she blows them sky high… Look here it is on the
scrummy cover:

I love this tag because I was allowed to
break a few of those ‘rules’ that can be drummed into you as an author in
series-style romance. Entangled Publishing and my editorial team let me do some
things that I thought I’d never get away with. There is irreverence, drunken
antics, drunken sex, some very bad language, cigarettes are smoked and there is
no audible rustling of foil wrappers …

So I’ll understand if I’m not asked back!

Here’s the official blurb for Blackmailed by the Billionaire Brewer:

Piper Reilly is in trouble. She needs a cash infusion,
and she’s just left a scorching hot man in Florida to get her life in Colorado
back on track. Then her surfside one-night-stand turns out to be her new boss,
billionaire Matt DeLeo, with an offer she can’t refuse—agree to be the face of
his brewery’s newest concoction or lose her job. A few weeks modelling for the
billionaire playboy and her money worries are over, and she can definitely
resist Matt’s gorgeous smile and muscular, tattooed arms—it’s strictly
business.

Matt DeLeo is
in trouble. He’s found the perfect woman to sell Passion Creek Brewery’s newest
brew, but if he wants her on his posters, he’ll have to keep his hands to
himself. But all he wants to do is drink in Piper. And once the launch is over,
it will take more than blackmail for Matt to get his way.

And, because I love you, here’s an ULTRA
EXCLUSIVE pic of me drinking beer in the Canary Islands to prove I had to put a
lot of research into this billionaire brewer book. It was hard work, I can tell
you (hellish) and the reason why I now have too many chins …

So now it’s your turn to let rip. What
rules do you hate, which ones would you like to see ripped up and stomped on in
fiction as well as real life? Do you have any personal writing rules that you
will never break? Spill!! (But I bag scrapping the difference between colons
and semi-colons because they hate me and I am thick.)